I lied through my childhood and through much of my adult life. I have usually been aware of it and i am not proud of it, but it has made me think a lot about truth and lies. I understand that lying autists are rare and i can see the logic behind this assumption; but i lied a lot. Of course, lying is mostly a way of hiding truth or what the liar imagines to be "truth." Lies have a lot in common with secrets which are alsp ways to hide truth or what a person or organization thinks is truth. A secret is a sort of lie by omission.

Lies and secrets almost destroyed my marriage so i came to understand that my relationship with Dianne had to be characterized by total honesty -- "searching and fearless" honesty. As i begin to grow "along spiritual lines" the centrality of openness and honesty seems more evident to me.In competitions, if one person, team. organization, army, or state uses deceptive strategoes and tactics and the other does not, the deceptive party mau have a distinct advantage. It should not be surprising to see massive deception at all levels of corporate activity. But there is a subversive minority which opposes such secrecy and lies and attempts to make insider information public.

Going one step farther, some idealists, convinced that means and ends cannot be separated, have refused to use deception against a deceptive opponent. Mohandas Gandhi, in India's struggle against British imperialism, accepted a strategy of total openness, always letting the enemy know what their next step would be.

I've been reading Dan Brown and am down to the final dozen pages of his third tome featuring claustraphobic academic "symbologist" Robert Langdon. Another overdisciplined, over arrogant, over developed brute attempts to bring chaos (more than we already have) to the world; and the Freemasons and the CIA are trying to stop him along with his accelarating serial killings.

A major problem is that the Masons possess certain secrets which the CIA agents think they need; while the CIA, in turn, is unwilling to share with the Masons, the secret knowledge that might justify them giving up those secrets.

As a reader not particularly partial to either the CIA or the Masons, i found both sets of secret knowledge rather trivial and accessable to almost any discerning person who micht want to discover them.

As i became more honest, i discovered that my secrets and lies had never really fooled anybody and that i would have been much better off being straightforward from the start. Could this principle be extended to the corporate level -- politics, business, and war. I think there is evidence that it could.